Culture club candidate

Farouk Hosny, Egypt's culture minister, needs to convince a panel of voters that he is not an anti-Semitic burner of Israeli books if he is to become director general of Unesco.

In a tiny alleyway in old Cairo, near small shops selling herbs and belly-dance costumes designed to appeal to western tourists' oriental fantasies, stands the ancient remains of the Maimonides synagogue.

After many years of abandonment, the Egyptian government is paying for the restoration work on the Jewish place of worship. The rubbish has been taken away, the walls and ceiling, which were suffering water damage, have been reinforced. The synagogue is named after the medieval Jewish philosopher and doctor, Moussa ben Maimon who fled persecution in his native Spain and found refuge in the court of Egypt's more enlightened Muslim rulers. He was the royal physician until his death in 1204 and was buried in the synagogue.

The esteemed rabbi's remains were long ago moved to Israel but the history lesson in mutual tolerance the synagogue offers for Arabs and Jews is perhaps worth remembering in light of the controversy raging over the culture minister Farouk Hosny's bid to become the director general of Unesco, the UN's Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. When voting for the prestigious post begins on Tuesday at the agency's headquarters in Paris, Mr Hosny, 71, will have to persuade the 58-member executive board that he is not the anti-Semitic book burner his critics have accused him of being.

The controversy began when in May 2008 an opposition politician in Egypt's parliament asked him if there were any Israeli books in a new library in Alexandria. "Burn these books. If there are any there, I will myself burn them in front of you," the minister said in response. In March, when he threw his hat into the ring for the Unesco job, the unfortunate choice of words came back to haunt him. As the only Arab among nine candidates, Mr Hosny, a painter specialising in abstract art and culture minister for two decades, was initially considered the front-runner for the job. No Arab or Muslim has been head of the organisation since it was established in 1945 to promote peace through the promotion and preservation of culture and education, and it was deemed perhaps time to appoint one in the spirit of conciliation between East and West.

Of the nine director generals elected since the agency opened, all but three have been European or American. They tend to be a mix of scholars and diplomats. The current head, Koichiro Matsuura, is a Japanese diplomat who has served his maximum two terms. For some, it is high time that Arabs, whose region is home to sites such as Petra in Jordan, the Pyramids of Egypt and the ruins of Baalbeck in Lebanon, received recognition for their contributions to science and culture.

"I think it would be positive to see an Arab as head of Unesco, considering the scale of contribution to culture the Arab world has given," said Chris Doyle, the director of the London-based Council for British-Arab Understanding. "It would show the Arab world is not just a consumer of western products and culture but once again at the head of culture, and education and science in the way it used to be, and having an Arab pilot such a programme would be positive."

Indeed Unesco's own stated mission is to "to build peace in the minds of men". But for Israelis and many in the Jewish diaspora, Mr Hosny's remarks in parliament evoked images of the Nazi bonfires of books in the 1930s. In the lead-up to the vote - the results will be announced by September 23 at the latest - a campaign has been underway to show him unfit for the post. The attacks began in May when Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher, Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize-winner and Holocaust survivor, and Claude Lanzmann, the film director, wrote a joint editorial in Le Monde accusing Mr Hosny of being a "dangerous man" whose comments represented an "anthology of terror" that should disqualify him from the job.

Mr Hosny wrote a reply in the newspaper shortly afterwards expressing regret over the comments. He has been on the back foot ever since. "I clearly regret the words said and which I could have justified as being uttered under the tension and provocation of the discussion at the time," he recently wrote on his website. "However, I will not take that as an excuse. This is neither my nature, nor what I believe in. Unfortunately my adversaries took advantage of this to attribute negative things to me. Nothing is more abhorrent to me than racism, rejection of the other or a desire to discredit any human culture, including the Jewish culture.

"These words were uttered with no intention... Do not look at one sentence. Review 27 years spent in the service of culture and make an assessment of what I did in the service of humanity, creativity, writers and books." He added that the conductor Daniel Barenboim had performed at the Cairo Opera House, Hebrew books were being translated into Arabic and, since 1998, he had commissioned the restoration of Egypt's 11 synagogues, including the Maimonides, which is expected to be completed next year.

Mr Hosny said his track record made him ideal to lead an organisation that is a guardian of the world's culture. Its world heritage sites and wonders-of-the-world lists are reminders of humanity's common bonds. But the ugly affair has exposed the deep hostilities between Egyptian intellectuals and their counterparts in the Jewish world. Egypt signed a peace deal with Israel in 1979, but the economic, security and diplomatic ties have not resulted in cultural links. Egyptian writers and artists for the most part refuse to have normal ties with Israel's intelligentsia until there is a solution to the Palestinian conflict.

"It is a legitimate, cultural peaceful resistance," said Nadim Shehadi, an associate fellow at Chatham House, an international affairs think tank in London. "It is the intellectuals' and moderates' way to reject what Israel has done rather than the violent way of the terrorists. It is a big issue." He continued: "After the Oslo agreement in 1993, the Gulf countries and some North African countries had trade representations with Israel, but there was a call to hold back on full normalisation of ties because it is the prize for Israel. That is one of the cards you hold to pressure Israel and don't give it that until there is a solution."

Full normalisation is a point that rankles Mr Hosny's opponents. "The only reason Hosny even has a shot at the Unesco job, which he'd be the first Arab to hold, is because, in a major reversal, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently lifted his country's opposition to the Egyptian's candidacy," wrote Raymond Stock, a Cairo-based translator in a scathing attack in the influential Foreign Policy magazine in August. "This whole imbroglio only serves to highlight the Egyptian literati's generally hateful and hidebound views of Israel, which are often more virulent than those of the Egyptian public at large."

Mr Hosny has powerful supporters at home, including President Hosni Mubarak, his wife Suzanne Mubarak, who is a patron of the arts, and Zahi Hawass, the head of the supreme council of antiquities. He is also backed by the Organisation of Islamic Conference and the African Union. But as Egypt tries to portray itself as a friend of Jewish culture, critics at home accuse the government of pandering to Israel. Indeed, last year, 26 intellectuals condemned Mr Hosny for saying in a newspaper that he'd be prepared to visit Israel.

The controversy has also overshadowed criticism from conservationists that Unesco which is meant to be the guardian of humanity's culture by protecting natural and man-made sites, promoting education and scientific thinking, is adrift. Earlier this year, the Geneva-based International Union for the Conservation of Nature and a close partner of Unesco, issued a report suggesting that the agency was not critical enough of its 193 member states and too hesitant in declaring vulnerable heritage and natural sites in danger.

There has also been some derision over the agency's publication of a sex education manual targeted for those aged five and above. The only other candidate with anywhere near Mr Hosny's profile is the Austrian, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the European Commissioner for external relations. For Egypt, however, having one of its own appointed to such a post is a matter of national pride. Ever since David Roberts, the Orientalist artist, travelled through Egypt and the holy lands on a grand tour in the 19th century and painted the remains of its sophisticated civilisations, the West has been fascinated with the exotic allure of the Middle East. That this continues was evident by the success of the recent Orientalism exhibition at Tate Modern in London, which travelled to Sharjah Art Museum earlier this year. Although the romanticised visions of souqs and hareem girls were far removed from the reality, they betray an ongoing appreciation of the Arab mystique.

The election of an Arab to the UN job would perhaps help to re-fashion the West's orientalist image of the Middle East into a modern one. But Hosny's remark about burning Israeli book will not go away. "It is very difficult to escape such a comment and unfortunately for him the comment is out there and it will be repeated and repeated that he is not in favour of freedom of expression," said Mr Doyle.

"That's the danger of politics unfortunately. One line can ruin you." * with additional reporting by Nadia abou el-Magd in Cairo